Imagine passing by a street or visiting a gallery and seeing the most beautiful masterpiece. But then, when you look closer, you see that it’s made of plastic cups, straws, bottles and lots of garbage. Yes. This is how Benjamin Von Wong’s art can be described as. The inspiration for this was born during his

Imagine passing by a street or visiting a gallery and seeing the most beautiful masterpiece. But then, when you look closer, you see that it’s made of plastic cups, straws, bottles and lots of garbage.

Yes. This is how Benjamin Von Wong’s art can be described as. The inspiration for this was born during his trip to Guatemala. It was during this trip and a close-up photo shoot of a massive trash heap that he realized the harm that every individual ‘small decisions’ had on nature.

Von Wong wanted to reach out to people and make them aware of the harm that plastic waste was causing. He wanted to use such an approach that would be productive and give out the harrowing facts about waste as well.

“Change happens when individuals come together to fight for something they believe in,” the artist said.

image credit – Von Wong Blog

In order to work on the #MermaidsHatePlastic project, the artist with a small army of volunteers collected 10,000 plastic. These bottles were first stripped of their label, the caps removed and then the bottles were hand washed by the volunteers as well. He put a mermaid in a sea of 10,000 plastic bottles.

He created the ‘Toxic Laundry Monster’ in order to bring awareness about the chemicals and microplastic that are released every time we wash our clothes.

His latest piece, ‘Strawpocalyps’ is meant to bring out the severity of the pollution caused by plastic straws. It took Von Wong and his team 6 months to collect 168,000 straws.

There is so much plastic waste all around that it won’t be a surprise if our water bodies are filled with plastic instead of fishes.

#plastikophibia was done by collecting 18,000 cups in just 1.5 days. While all the masterpieces created by Benjamin Von Wong are absolutely breathtaking, they are also a reminder of the destruction we are causing to the Earth.

image credits – My Modern Met

“we don’t inherit this planet from our parents, we borrow it from our children”, the artist quoted in his post.